And Now Donald Trump Will Start Fulfilling His Destiny

I looked away from the campaign for a second on Tuesday and, as de Tocqueville once wrote to Thomas Paine, the hamster fell completely off the wheel. First, MSNBC calls shenanigans on the Democratic National Committee and muses about holding an underground debate in New Hampshire with the three Democratic candidates. That was merely the appetizer, however. In Iowa, He, Trump announced that Megyn Kelly was one thing up with which he would not put, and announced that he and Roger Ailes had broken up again, and that he would not be gracing the Fox News debate stage on Thursday night.

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First of all, I will believe this when I don't see him there. (Later Tuesday night, Trump announced that he might be willing to enter into negotiations, but only with Rupert Murdoch his own self.) But, upon his announcement, opinions about whether or not this was a good move or a bad one sprang up all over the lot. One school of thought said it was a brilliant ploy to steal the news cycle and to run out the clock on his opponents in Iowa. Yet another school of thought decided that it was the first real blunder He, Trump had made. Yet another school of thought has it that nobody knows anything, and that He, Trump already had torn up the rulebook and thrown the pieces into an electric fan, and that there is absolutely nothing he can do to his campaign that is fatal. As you might expect, given the affection around this shebeen for political chaos, I am very much of this third opinion. Surely it's a gamble, but it's a gamble that only he can take because only He, Trump has as much to lose by taking it.

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But something else has been going on in the last couple of weeks, too. A startling amount of coherence has started to become evident in the Trump campaign. Up until now, the only real underlying philosophy to the enterprise has been I am Donald Trump and you're not, and neither are those losers, either. But, whether or not he's picked this up in his travels, or whether or not this was going to be the pitch all along, He, Trump now has the stirrings of the beginnings of a message in his madness. You could see it in the glee with which he slapped Fox News around on Tuesday. He now is running quite clearly on the idea that Republican voters have been played for rubes and suckers by the major institutions of their party and by the conservative movement. He is so confident in this role that he can even come out quite clearly in favor of an idea he shares with practically every Democratic politician alive.

Democrats have tried to give Medicare this power since at least 2003, when Medicare Part D, which gives beneficiaries prescription drug benefits, passed. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and President Barack Obama all agree with Trump that Medicare ought to have the authority to push back against drug companies that ask for really high prices. Republicans have opposed such policies, saying that lower prices would leave drugmakers with less money for research—and leave Americans with less innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. But Trump isn't like other Republicans. He talks a lot about how he isn't beholden to special interests because he is financing his own campaign. This isn't fully true—Trump does take outside donations alongside his own contribution—but voters like the rhetoric and the idea that he can't be bought. This Medicare proposal only builds on that narrative.

This was a fascinating moment that got lost in all the noise that attends He, Trump. It was completely obscured by the brawl over Thursday night debates. And I'm not entirely sure that I'm right about it, but I'm coming around to the notion that He, Trump is starting to feel the stirrings of a strange destiny in what he's doing, something beyond the pure narcissism and megalomania that were his original reasons for running in the first place. Of course, I could be wrong because the hamster's fallen completely off the wheel and nobody knows anything this year. But maybe it takes a Trump to begin the process of deprogramming the members of the conservative cult who vote in favor of people who ignore them, time and time again.